Knockout rats are among the runners up of Science Magazine's Breakthrough of the Year selection. This acknowledges the recent development in zink finger nuclease, knockout and transposon technologies which could mean that "knockout and genetically modified rats may soon displace their smaller cousins in lab cages around the world".

Science Magazine NEWS OF THE WEEK on the latest developments in knockout rat technologies. Dennis Normile interviewed Tim Aitman (Imperial College London) and refers to Aron Geurths' work with Zink Finger Nuclease technolgy (Medical College of Wisconsin, Milwaukee) and Zsuzsanna Izsvaks' work with transposons (Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine, Berlin), all of them Principal Investigators in the EURATRANS consortium.